Sunday, September 18, 2005

Identity as a point of systems

Wrapping up this porfolio submission in Graphic Arts and found myself wrapped around the point of identity. While I had covered theme, motif, positioning and brand - these wind up interrelated and almost interchangeable, since they all deal with identity. Corporations and individuals both have the problem of protecting and projecting identity. It is only a problem as people and businesses are constantly eroded by society and made less through the sheer bulk of humanity with their own varying needs and wants. Corporations and people seemingly have to constantly reassert their identity in order to carry out business, do work and earn money through exchange.

Corporations have evolved marketing to ensure their survival as an entity, to ensure people are able to return to them for repeat sales. The better they "brand" or "position" themselves, the more they are able to attract and retain business/sales and so they move up the Long Tail to better survival for themselves and their stakeholders.

Individuals also "brand" themselves. (Corporate work is a reflection of the work which individuals do to solve the same problems - only on a much larger scale. This is the definition of coporation itself, which says the business entity has a "corpus" - Latin for "body".) So all marketing can be reverse engineered to apply to the individual. How a person's identity is acquired is through appearance and action. Consistency of both preserve a specific identity. Inconsistent appearance and deed give a false aspect, since the person cannot be trusted. Having a hidden life wrecks the apparent one once the other is found out. Schizophrenia and other forms of insanity are devolved from this one point of personal integrity.